If you run payroll in Missouri, your sick-leave obligations have flipped twice in under four months — mandatory in May, gone by late August — and they could flip again after the next statewide vote. Every flip lands in the same place: your timekeeping system, your payroll codes, and your books. This guide walks through exactly what changed, what to reconcile now, and how to set up your records so the next change is a configuration toggle instead of a fire drill.
What happened, in 90 seconds
- November 5, 2024: Missouri voters approved Proposition A with about 58% of the vote. It raised the state minimum wage and required employers to provide one hour of earned paid sick time for every 30 hours worked.
- May 1, 2025: The paid sick leave mandate took effect. For roughly four months, Missouri employers had to accrue, track, and allow the use of statutory sick time.
- May 14, 2025: The Missouri Senate passed House Bill 567, repealing the paid sick leave provisions and scrapping the planned cost-of-living increases to the minimum wage.
- July 10, 2025: The governor signed the repeal into law.
- August 28, 2025: The repeal took effect. From that date, Missouri employers are no longer required by state law to provide paid sick leave.
Two related facts matter for your budget even though sick leave is gone. The minimum wage still rose to $13.75 per hour in 2025 and is scheduled to reach $15.00 per hour on January 1, 2026. What the repeal killed on the wage side is the automatic annual inflation adjustment that would have applied from 2027 onward.
What Prop A actually required (and why it still matters)
You may need to run these rules again, so keep them somewhere better than memory. Under Proposition A as it was in effect from May through August 2025:
- Accrual: Employees earned at least one hour of paid sick time for every 30 hours worked, including part-time and irregular schedules — every 30-hour milestone counted, even across non-consecutive shifts and multiple weeks.
- No accrual cap: The statute did not cap how much sick time could accumulate on the books.
- Annual use caps: Employers with 15 or more employees could limit use to 56 hours per year; smaller employers could limit use to 40 hours per year.
- Uses: Leave could be used for the employee's own illness or preventive care and for caring for family members, which is why the mandate reached into attendance policies, not just payroll.
- Exempt employees: For salaried exempt staff, accrual was generally calculated on an assumed 40-hour workweek.
- Recordkeeping: Employers had to track hours worked, sick time accrued, sick time used, and remaining balances — the full ledger, not just a year-end total.
One analysis estimated the mandate extended guaranteed sick leave to roughly 728,000 Missouri workers who previously lacked it — more than one in three workers statewide. Whether or not that number surprises you, it explains the compliance stakes: this was not a niche rule.
Why learn repealed rules?
Because a repeal is not the same as a final answer. Worker advocates have already filed a proposed constitutional amendment aimed at restoring sick-leave protections through the 2026 ballot, precisely because a constitutional provision is harder for the legislature to unwind than the statute voters passed in 2024. A separate ballot effort would make it harder for lawmakers to rewrite voter-approved measures in general. Neither is certified yet, but the direction is clear: Missouri employers should treat paid sick leave as dormant, not dead.
Where things stand right now
As of today, there is no statewide mandate requiring Missouri private employers to provide paid sick leave. If you kept a voluntary PTO or sick-leave policy, that policy — plus any promises in offer letters and handbooks — is what governs. Federal obligations never went away either: FMLA leave, ADA accommodations, and any local requirements that apply to your workforce still need tracking.
That creates three distinct bookkeeping situations, and most Missouri businesses are in one of them:
- You had no paid leave policy before Prop A. You built accrual tracking for the mandate, then turned it off in late August. Your job now is reconciling the May–August window and deciding what, if anything, to offer voluntarily.
- You already had PTO that met or beat Prop A. You likely mapped your existing policy onto the statutory requirements during the mandate window. Your job now is un-mapping cleanly without breaking the records you will need if a mandate returns.
- You kept or added paid sick leave voluntarily after the repeal. Your job is running it as a company policy with clear books, so a future mandate stacks onto clean records instead of tangled ones.
The bookkeeping playbook: five moves to make now
1. Pause the accrual machinery — don't delete it
The single most expensive mistake is tearing out the tracking you built in spring 2025. If a 2026 measure restores accrual at the same 1-hour-per-30 rate, rebuilding payroll codes, pay stubs, and balance reports from scratch will cost far more than leaving them dormant.
In your payroll system, set the Missouri statutory sick-leave accrual rate to zero effective August 28, 2025, but keep the pay codes, balance fields, and stub line items in place. Label them clearly as inactive-by-repeal with the effective date, so a future administrator (or auditor) can see exactly what happened without guessing. The same goes for any timekeeping rules that counted hours toward the 30-hour milestones — disable, don't destroy.
2. Reconcile the May–August accrual window and close it in writing
You ran a statutory accrual program for roughly 17 weeks. Close it like you would close any short-lived liability account:
- Freeze final balances as of August 27, 2025: hours accrued, hours used, and hours remaining, per employee.
- Document your disposition decision. The repeal ended the mandate going forward; it did not write your company policy for already-accrued hours. Decide — and put in writing — whether remaining balances were paid out, converted into voluntary PTO, or forfeited, and apply the decision consistently.
- Keep the underlying records. Hours-worked logs, accrual calculations, and usage records from the mandate window are the evidence that you complied while the law was in force. Retain them on at least the same schedule as your other payroll records; if a dispute about that window ever arises, reconstructed spreadsheets will not carry the weight of contemporaneous system reports.
- Issue corrected summaries to employees showing their final statutory balance and what happened to it, so nobody discovers a zeroed balance at the worst possible moment.
3. Keep statutory sick time and voluntary PTO in separate buckets
If you offer leave voluntarily now, resist the urge to pour it into the same account the mandate used. Create distinct pay codes and general-ledger buckets: one for any voluntary sick/PTO policy, and the dormant statutory series preserved from the mandate window. Commingling them makes three things harder: proving what you did voluntarily, computing what a reinstated mandate would add on top, and answering an employee who asks which hours are which. Separation costs one extra code and saves hours of forensic accounting later.
4. Budget the $15 minimum wage now — it survived the repeal
The sick-leave repeal left the scheduled wage increase intact: Missouri's minimum wage reaches $15.00 per hour on January 1, 2026, with no further inflation indexing after that. If your labor model still assumes $13.75, update it this quarter, not in December. For tipped, part-time-heavy, or multi-rate workforces, model the change employee by employee — a flat percentage bump applied to total payroll will misstate the impact wherever hours cluster near the floor. And if you price multi-month jobs or service contracts that span the new year, build the January rate into quotes you sign this fall.
5. Build a "the law changed again" drill
Missouri employers have now lived through an on-again, off-again mandate inside a single year. Treat that as the planning case, not an anomaly:
- Name an owner for leave-law monitoring — one person whose job includes watching the 2026 ballot measures and flagging certification milestones, not just election results.
- Pre-draft the employee notice you would send if accrual restarts: what accrues, at what rate, starting when. A template beats a scramble.
- Keep hour-level time data. The 1-per-30 rule runs on cumulative hours worked, which means clean, auditable hours are the raw material of compliance. If your timekeeping is approximate today, the next mandate will expose it.
- Calendar the trigger points: signature-verification deadlines, ballot certification, the election itself, and any stated effective date. Compliance lead time is measured from certification, not from Election Day.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Deleting payroll codes and balance history to "clean up" after the repeal. Storage is cheap; reconstruction is not.
- Assuming the repeal erased the mandate window. Your May–August obligations were real while they lasted, and the records should show it.
- Telling employees accrued hours "carry over under the new policy" verbally without a written policy amendment. Ambiguity here becomes a wage claim later.
- Forgetting the wage side. Teams focused on sick leave have missed the January 2026 $15 rate in budgeting — the part of Prop A that is definitely still coming.
- Ignoring the ballot until November 2026. By the time a measure is certified, payroll vendors, handbook updates, and manager training all need lead time. Monitoring is the cheap part.
Simplify Your Financial Management
Payroll rules that switch on and off with each legislative session are exactly why your leave balances, wage rates, and labor costs belong in one transparent, auditable set of books. Beancount.io provides plain-text accounting that gives you complete transparency and control over your financial data — no black boxes, no vendor lock-in. Get started for free and keep every accrual, payout, and policy change traceable the next time the rules move.